


yes, you need to be there to plant a garden

by chaeryeong (iverins)



Category: Stray Kids (Band), fromis_9 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 19:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19892866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/chaeryeong
Summary: Because, in the nature of primacy, it does not matter where your heart is facing if you don't tell someone where.





	yes, you need to be there to plant a garden

**Author's Note:**

> does this make sense? no...  
> that said, i'm sorry i continued to write it. TT
> 
> **title taken from the cover of bon iver's single "hey ma"**

In an effort to exert her own humanity as top of the food chain, Jisun's gotten good at killing insects that find their ways into her apartment. Bottom of the slipper for cockroaches in the bathroom at the middle of the night, a collection of old rolled-up newspapers abandoned in corners of the kitchen for flies over freshly-sliced watermelon, and an electric swatter – courtesy of Minho – hanging on this nailed-in hook – also courtesy of Minho – _just in case._

"Of what?" she asks when that's the reason he gives after gifting it to her out of the blue, five months after her birthday. She can't remember what he'd said then, so this is what she says whenever someone asks her about it now: _just in case._

Minho doesn't like bugs. Doesn't kill them, either, and one time he calls Jisun to his place for an _emergency, I swear,_ she runs all the way in her house slippers to find him cowering from a long-legged spider spinning a web near his toilet.

"You're hopeless," Jisun tells him as she bunches the tissue paper into a wad and throws it into his trash bin. He crowds against her while she's washing her hands at the sink, wraps his arms around her waist, presses his chin into her shoulder. It’s borderline parasitic. He says the sweat on her neck smells like the body wash he left at hers two weeks ago.

But summer's the season for things like this. In the heat, life desperately wants to manifest before the onset of the cold, and that desperation lends itself to overgrowth. And Jisun's convinced, as the chosen apex predator, the true big cat – _rawr_ – that there's a balance that needs to be maintained, even if that balance is but sequestered to her tiny bathroom floor.

In the heat, there’s also this: the incessant primal urge to procreate. One night after they’ve had sex, Minho discards the condom, cracks open a window, and comes back into bed, a cut of moonlight tracing the places where Jisun’s fingernails dug into his back. Pressing against them with her knuckles – he inhales, sharp – and then her lips – breathing evens, Jisun holds the sides of his ribcage, expanding, contracting – she tells him, impatient, “This means that you’re mine.”

He hums. “Okay,” he replies, a little too uncharacteristically easy. Jisun waits for him to say something else, rubbing her toes together, impatient. Ten minutes later, she realizes he’s fallen asleep.

Disappointed, Jisun turns onto her back and closes her eyes, too. Just as Minho starts to snore softly, she wonders if there’s any cockroaches left on her bathroom floor, out for her to kill.

Love can be as organic as the human body, if grown in certified organic soil, and fed certified organic feed, and had its practices audited for compliance. In a similar vein of contemplation, you could say that Minho is in love with Jisun, and that love – if you were particularly romantic – is in so much a part of him as is the marrow in his bones.

Again, there's this thing with saying though: sometimes people say things just to say them. Like – "Ah, fuck!" Minho will exclaim in the afternoon, after staring aimlessly at the ceiling for the better part of an hour.

"What?" Jisun will ask, flinching. "Did you forget to do something?"

Minho rolls around, cranes his neck to look at her. "No," he tells her. Though now that she mentions it, it feels like there's something to be said on the tip of his tongue, but his brain doesn't reciprocate this itch.

Jisun frowns, textbook still open before her, forgotten. "Then what?"

Minho shrugs. "I just wanted to say it." And Jisun rolls her eyes at that, mouthing _annoying,_ enunciation just clear enough for him to decipher, and ignores him until dinnertime.

According to Jisun, there's this specific way Minho likes to conduct his conversations. It's like – there's something there, surface level, easy to grasp, but that's not the point, never the point. It's like – once you know that's not the point, you dive a little deeper, but that's not it either. It's like – you're so far in that you go further and further until your lungs burn and you have to come up for air. It's like –

"Like this, I could drown for you, or go so deep and you never tell me when. Or I give up, come up for air and realize I'm all by myself in this ocean, cold and wet and exhausted." _[She whispers this into his shirt that is pressed against his chest, that is, therefore, superimposed onto his heart.]_ "Instinctively, the first thing I do is look for any body of land or a ship or anything I can hold onto. And then I realize," _[her brows furrow in thought],_ "that this entire ocean is a simulation. That I can stand up, and the water doesn't even reach my thighs. And that whatever meaning I was supposed to get I've either lost in its entirety, or that it was all just a test in the first place. I don't know if I've passed, or won, or what this all means, but, I'd imagine, somewhere at the end, you're there. And you smile at me."

 _[These brackets exist for hypotheticals. Words between them, heavy, but left unsaid.]_ "And even then, for you, that still might not be enough." _[They do not know how to say these things to each other. Outside, there are the beginnings of an early August storm.]_

Cohabitation, naturally, is the next step. This is learned. Biologically, however, sometimes Minho needs the eleven minute walk to Jisun's via Google Maps to revert back into the someone he becomes when he's alone, and it takes every floppy-sole sandaled step to unravel into that skin.

There is something so demanding about giving every piece of yourself to someone, and unlearning how to fear the possibility you'll receive nothing in return. And maybe now, as the apex predator, natural selection has become those who learn how to reciprocate and those who lie awake nights, wondering if they'll ever be able to let go.

It's like this – in the face of evolution, the Minho of the past threw away a piece of himself out of the trepidation that it might never be returned.

"You can stay," Jisun mumbles into the jacket he'd draped over her on the sofa when she'd fallen asleep before the episode of their recent favorite drama finished airing. He pauses from where he's leaning against the wall, slipping his feet into his sandals. "Stay."

He inhales.

It's like this – at the end of their first big fight, Minho showed up at Jisun's door, soaked from the rain from head to toe, tracking mud all over the cute doormat with this cat and dog print on it that they'd bought at the Daiso two stops away, and said simply, "I'm sorry."

 _That's it?_ Jisun asked, knuckles going white from where she was still clutching the half-open door.

Minho shrugged. _That's it._ And they stared at each other until Jisun let him in, sat him down in her bathroom, and washed his hair for him. He kissed her through the suds until there were soap stains all over her sweater.

So Minho walks back over to her, pressing his mouth against her forehead. "Good night, Jisun," he whispers into her hair. And on replay after a few years, when they've grown older and wiser and apart from each other, they will look back and comment how this was the beginning of the end, or where the fissure took root in the concrete, only for them to discover it too late.

It's like this – " _Ah,_ " Minho says just to say it, hand on the doorknob. This time, Jisun doesn't flinch or stir from sleep.

It's like this – again, there's this thing with saying: sometimes you’re just overtaken by this primal instinct to communicate. Minho opens the door, the blast of cicada songs hitting him full-force. And the feeling unfurls in your chest, blooms, releases, and you open your mouth – there are no words to put this feeling into. Only the idea of something to be said and the warm summer night air, slipping against your tongue, exist. You close it. And then, as time never stopped, everything senesces.

It's like this – this is one of those nights Minho lies awake, alone, wondering if he'll ever actually be able to let go.

On the hottest day of summer on record, by far –

"Are you awake?" Jisun whispers. The air conditioner's turned off sometime in the middle of the night, made them sticky with sweat. And in this infinitesimal universe – the size of Minho's twin-sized bed, their legs tangled in the sheets they were trying to kick off the bed in sleep – there is only the distant hum of cicadas, and them.

"Mm." There is space between them that he closes by snaking his arms around her middle. "Love you."[1]

She laughs from her nose. "Don't kid yourself,"[2] Jisun says, quiet and a little too uncharacteristically serious, tracing Minho's bottom lip with her thumb.

He opens wide. Her skin tastes like salt and the body wash he left at hers two weeks ago.[3]

Because, in the nature of primacy, it does not matter where your heart is facing –

Jisun tucks her hair behind her ear when she asks Minho out first. _[They will always associate the cicadas in the summer with a tragedy.]_ He gives her a smile in return, with his dopey, slightly uneven front teeth and tells her, "Yes." _[One time Jisun absentmindedly traced the bottoms of them with her index finger when he fell asleep with his mouth open on the couch and wiped the residual saliva onto the sleeve of his shirt. He blinked at her, groggy, woken up by the sensation. "What was that?" he said, his voice deep from sleep, to which she feigned nonchalance – "What was what?" And then he pulled her down to his chest and kissed her with his gross morning breath, anyway, and Jisun rolled her eyes but she let him.]_

Now, in otherwise silence, they listen to the pouring of the rain outside in the night, unmoving. _[If love is organic like the human body, then it lives and dies with us, disintegrates with our bones into the soil bit by bit by bit until it is gone into the land, one once more in the womb you were pushed from, ready to be birthed again.]_

– if you don't tell someone where.

[1] I put up these walls for you and treat conversations like a match because I'm afraid that one day when you leave, you will leave with all of me. And I'm afraid that already, I've torn down these walls and you – lovingly, gently, _petrifyingly_ – have placed your hand on my jugular. I don't want to be afraid, but at the same time, I can feel you every time my heart beats, and if that is not love, I'm afraid I'll never know it.

[2] If you are afraid to get hurt. _[Jisun meets his gaze.]_ You will.

[3] They do not tell each other that they both laid awake on their backs, staring at the ceiling, wondering how the inevitable end of their relationship would take form, only falling asleep when they succumbed to the heat and exhaustion.

**Author's Note:**

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